22 April 2013

Nature's Value

Happy fifteenth anniversary Disney’s Animal Kingdom!

Five years ago today, I got to sit in the Theater in the
Wild and listen to Joe Rohde speak with Cast Members and a selection of guests
about Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It still stands today as one of my most
treasured Disney experiences. Back then, not a lot of people knew about the
Main Street Gazette, so not many people got to see the transcript of the event
I posted, so I am going to reprint it today.

As I did then, I want to apologize for the transcribing. It
was done over the course of several late nights, and I tried not to edit the
phrasing as I went, simply to let the words speak for themselves.

This is an incredible discussion of design principles,
stories of inspiration and creation, and a passion for a place. There is, in
fact, something for everyone to gleam from Joe Rohde’s presentation, and I hope
you find not what you are looking for but what you never expected to discover
in the following transcript.

Well thanks Val. So, I know since we’re all kind of insiders. You
know we’re all cast members, and we kind of, you know, know the ropes of
Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Rather than doing a very very formal
presentation, I was gonna try and just talk about some of the ideas that
went into making the park. I know some of you were probably here when
the park opened, but I imagine there’s quite a few of you that have come
to Animal Kingdom since it opened. So some of this might be old
information to some of you, some of it will be new information to others
of you, and I’ll just try and talk about some of how we went about the
process of conceptualizing the park, and what we tried to have it mean.

I
mean Imagineering has been around for a long time, some of you may have
had direct involvement with Imagineers through one aspect of your job
or another. It’s quite a diverse group of people that we are, and not
simply diverse in the fact that we come from different professional
backgrounds. Indeed we have architects, and engineers, and business
managers, and illustrators, and sculptors, and acoustical engineers, and
industrial engineers, all kinds of people working in Imagineering. But
also, there’s not really kind of like a formal job qualification to be
an Imagineer, so we end up with extremely diverse people from very very
diverse points of view. It’s really an odd mix of people that we bring
together to do this job. And when we set out, this was a million years
ago, it was actually, I’ll tell you the very first meeting that I ever
ever had to talk about doing something that was gonna have to do with
animals was probably in August of 1989. And Eisner had this idea ‘we
want to do something about animals,’ and I went into this meeting with
him, a meeting which lasted about five minutes. In which he was like,
“people like animals, people like Disney, if Disney did something with
animals, people would like that.” You know, and that was it. There was
one other statement which was, “You know, we’ve got the Magic Kingdom,
we should have the Animal Kingdom.” Like that’s a sentence that somehow
makes sense. So, and that was it. It was sort of like, you know, mystic
words from the pharaoh, okay. That’s the mission. And away we’re gonna
go with it.

And I have to say, in the early years of
thinking about Animal Kingdom, all of this seems rather old news to many
of us now, but it was a real dark horse kind of project. I mean
everybody was, they were still building the European Disneyland, the one
in Paris, there were all kinds of other ideas out there that drew
tremendous focus from Imagineering and from the company, and here was
this tiny little team of people, nobody had really ever heard of any of
us, it’s not like we were famous, and, you know, my earring was much
smaller, so, you know, nobody noticed me running around, doing this
thing, with this odd group of people. And I would have to say, in
general, most people figured, ‘okay, this is just some odd exploration
of some idea, may or may not happen, but probably won’t happen.’

If
you’ve read the book, the Making of Animal Kingdom, I think this is
mentioned in the book, because Eisner had had such a, he really wanted
to do this thing with animals, they had gone off and done this big
study, a huge 400 page white paper study, from the Business Division,
what used to be called Strategic Planning, study of zoos all over the
country, and you know, how much did people pay to go into them, how much
did they cost to run, and blah, blah, blah, all these things. And this
big document basically was presented to the company saying, ‘you don’t
want to do this. There’s zoos all over the country, you know, people pay
fifteen bucks to go in, they’re all subsidized by governments, they’re
subsidized by volunteer labor,’ a million reasons why this isn’t a good
idea. So all of this was already in place the first morning any of us
sat down to think about Animal Kingdom. But they did us the great favor
of presenting us with this giant 400 page document. Which basically
described, okay, you know, if you don’t do this, then you might be able
to do something. So we set about really from the very beginning to make
sure that what we were describing, what we were talking about doing,
would sort of veer off sideways from everything that was described in
this giant document they so obligingly gave us to read.

Pardon
me if my voice is a little shaky, I was talking all day long, ‘til like
midnight yesterday, and of course all morning this morning.

So,
I have slides that I am gonna sort of talk through a little bit of that
history of how things went down in those years. But one of the things I
think would interesting for all of you to understand is that to the
degree to it, as much as Animal Kingdom is a place, it’s obvious that
it’s a place it is built out of concrete, it’s built out of steel, it’s
got doors, it’s got air conditioning, people come and go, it was really
conceptualized as a story. We really do think about it the way that we
think about a movie, the way you think about a play, the way you think
about a novel. It just happens to be built out of physical objects, but,
in fact, it is meant to function like a story, a story that when people
come they are wrapped up inside of this story. And to the degree that
they choose to use their own imaginations and to indulge in the reality
of that story, to that degree, we wanted to provide them a place to be
that real for them. Not everybody wants to do that, obviously there’s
some people who want to ping off, you know, every E-Ticket they can here
and then buzz off to another theme park. Okay, that’s great. I don’t
actually think that’s the way to reap the value of what has gone into
Animal Kingdom. I really think the best way to get the value out of
Animal Kingdom is to really really slow down and pay attention and sort
of read it the way you would read a really really complicated and rich
kind of novel.

So , like I said, I’m not, this isn’t
like a, I don’t have like a structured presentation, I’m gonna sort of
show slides and I’m gonna talk about what the slides represent talk
about some ideas, I have one little riff I’m gonna take you through,
might help you understand how we think, and we’ll just see where that
leads us.

Now, I wonder if, is that screen good enough
for you guys? Cause some of these slides, let’s just see when we go to
this slide if its, cause otherwise I can take the lights down a little
bit.

Okay, so this is Disney’s Animal Kingdom. If you
travel the property at all you can almost see where everything is.
There’s the big canal that runs through the Northern Savannah, as a
matter of fact, that little crossover is still there, right in the
middle of the elephant area of the Savannah. See where the little road
goes over the canal. And then that great big thing that looks a little
bit like a racetrack, big chunks of that are still there, pretty much
where Asia is today, where the unbuilt part of Asia, beyond Kali River
Rapids, that’s kind of where that is. And then as you look down that
road that continues on down, you can kind of figure out where Africa
goes, almost half way down, really to where those, you see the sort of
three big sandy patches, that’s about where Africa is. And the Tree of
Life is almost where that sandy patch starts to touch, sort of beyond
that sandy patch, just the beginning of that dark foliage. It was just
this gigantic piece of land, that we were going to imagine, we were
going to do something interesting on. Which is, in its way, if you think
about it, it’s incredibly arrogant, that a bunch of us just sat down
like ‘Would you please give us this giant giant piece of land, and give
us millions and millions of dollars, and just trust us that we’re gonna
do a really cool thing with all of it, later, that you can see when its
open.’ And for some reason, that escapes me to this day, they decided
that was a good idea, and we got to do it. But it did take many many
years before the company was ready to make that decision and to fund the
project. And those years were spent in a tremendous amount of study and
preparation to begin to be serious about getting Animal Kingdom built.

This
is us, I think we are measuring off the spot where the Tree of Life
ended up being. And we sort of drove out, this was our first chance to
go out on the site, we were all so excited, we put on our boots,‘cause
we are all afraid of snakes, and we go tromping off into the middle of
this site, most of which was cow pasture and the old fireworks testing
area. But there were these little areas with trees in there, mostly the
kind of scrub pine kind of stuff, and then the oaks, which, of course,
in the end we saved the saved the areas where we found the oaks.

For
those of you who weren’t part of getting it built, or that weren’t here
on opening day, or that weren’t privy to all of the stuff that went
into describing the project when it first opened, it is kind of hard to
imagine that, once upon a time, it was just sand. I mean, miles of sand.
This is looking from the Tree of Life towards Asia, those of you who
can kind of recognize the scene a little bit will see that the
foundations of the Asia bridge, you can see the little peninsula doesn’t
even have the little temple on it yet, down here is the shop. There’s
like nothing. When I came down here for my first, I relocated down here
to build Animal Kingdom, I walk out on the site, and this is probably
1995, and it just looked like Mongolia. As far as you could see was
nothing, nothing but nothing, giant dunes of sand and imported soil
stretching to the horizon, with sandstorms on them. I mean it was like
Lawrence of Arabia. And you’d walk off onto this giant site, you really
could not even see across the site, and far away you’d see a little
truck disappear behind some sand dune that’s like a mile away.

I
actually got lost one day. I really did. I was walking, cause you’ve
got to picture, there’s no navigational stuff, right, there’s just
mounds of dirt and trails of dirt that some of them just dead end. I’m
walking along, and I realize that I don’t know where I am. I, I don’t
know where I am. And I don’t know which way I’m going, and I’m
surrounded by sand and sand dunes, and I go to the top of the sand dune
and I just see more sand dunes. I just have to walk until I get to the
edge, you know, and then that will tell me, I’ll walk along the edge
until I find something.

So, it’s amazing really how
much of this is a creation. What we see today is a creation, a thing
that was made, and in that sense, it’s a fiction, it’s a fictional
thing. We made it up, we put it in, it grows, but because it’s a story,
rather than really really truly real place, you really have to always
keep in mind, and we always try to keep in mind, the fact that it is
meant to be structured like a story. And I don’t know how many of you
have ever read a book on storycraft, or how to write your award winning
screen play, or how to write a play, but they generally all open with
the same kind of information. And it talks a lot, as a matter of fact,
about theme, and about the fact that if you expect your story to hang
together across the long run, you’ve got to do a lot of work right up
front on what is the theme. That word theme, this some of you may know
this, it drives me completely out of my mind crazy when I hear this word
misuse. Theme is a noun, it is not a verb, you cannot theme a thing. A
theme is the underlying value system upon which a story is built. It is
not the fake wood detailing on the outside of a box. So when you start
by thinking about theme, you really have to ask yourself hard questions.
Well, why am I interested in this story? What would move me emotionally
about this story? Why would other people be interested in this story?
What’s the universal human value at the bottom of this story? That’s
gonna be the theme. And if you can find those themes, and there can be
very many of them, because they start cross past each other and getting
way too complicated, you find those themes, you dedicate yourself to
those themes, and you try to drive every single piece of design to
follow these themes.

Now, not the only one, but one of
the major themes of Disney’s Animal Kingdom is this intrinsic value of
nature, this idea that nature itself has a value, which is a greater
value than anything else you can put on the other side of the ballast.
Nature’s value is greater than money, nature’s value is greater than
convenience, nature has intrinsic value, a value in and of itself. I
don’t have to save the environment because it’s good for the watershed, I
can just save the environment because it’s got value. So, if this is
one of the fundamental values of Animal Kingdom, and we decided very
early on if you were going to have animals, by default, it’s gonna be,
you’re gonna have this theme of nature, and the animals can’t be
strangers in this environment. This has to be a place where animals make
sense, and animals don’t behave like theme park audio-animatronics,
they have life, they have will, they do what they please, they live,
they have babies, they eventually die. So, if you are going to have a
place that is about animals, it has to be about the very idea at the
very bottom of animals, which is the intrinsic value of nature.

So,
if you set that at the base of an idea, and then you start to roll out a
bunch of choices, the choices become very clear, it’s really
interesting. For example, if there was no Animal Kingdom, and you were
faced with a choice of, okay, I want to do a park about the intrinsic
value of nature, is that park going to be fundamentally about
architecture or fundamentally about landscape? Landscape. Landscape,
it’s just so obvious, right? So, you go, okay, it’s gonna be about
landscape. Well, this is a landscape element. This landscape element
does not say very much about the intrinsic value of nature, as a matter
of fact, is say a whole lot about the overwhelming power of mankind.
It’s a little plant, surrounded by circle, in a bunch of pavement. But,
it’s a landscape object, so clearly the job is not yet done, there’s
more story work to be done, before you even begin your design. There’s
all kinds of landscape, you need to sort it all, gather it into bundles,
and present yourself with another branching choice.

If
my park is about the intrinsic value of nature, and I have to choose
between kind of formal, linear, organized, grid-like landscape elements
or curvilinear, natural, irregular landscape elements, which am I gonna
choose? Irregular. Because formal, straight, linear: not nature. So you
choose. And what that leads us to, what it led us to, was a kind of a
statement that we could say, ‘Look, when we begin designing, our design
is going to be like this. The intrinsic value of nature means that, you
know, nature is gonna dominate the whole design, it’s gonna be about
natural forms, we’re gonna let natural things take place, we’re going to
deliberately make the architecture subordinate to the natural forms,
the architecture has to appear to either be celebrating nature itself or
it has to appear to be succumbing to nature itself. That way it will be
obvious in the very design of the park, when we begin to design, that
this is a park about the intrinsic value of nature.’

And
so we did this several times, we took different design elements, we
did, in fact, revisit the architecture itself, and figure, ‘Okay, we
know we have to have architecture, we just know we don’t want to have
the architecture be dominant. So, how does this theme express itself in
architecture?’ We did this with several themes, the intrinsic value of
nature, this sort of transforming power of physical adventure, that if
you go out and dare yourself to do things, you will come back changed,
this sort of theme of the universal love of animals, that one way or
another, whether it’s a live animal, an imaginary animal, a prehistoric
animal, a storybook animal, one way or another there is a form of the
animal world that brings people emotionally alive and that we can use to
bring them into contact with this idea. And that all happens before we
start thinking, ‘Okay, maybe we could have a ride that did this, a maybe
we could do that, and there could be a big tree, maybe there’s a river,
maybe there’s an island, maybe there’s a giant broccoli, whatever.’ And
that goes down on cards.

Now this is kind of cool. I
don’t know why we did this, but as we were developing Animal Kingdom, we
never threw these cards away. We stuck them in boxes. So these are the
real cards, we really did pin to the board, almost twenty years ago,
when we were beginning to talk about the design of Disney’s Animal
Kingdom. These words that are written on these cards, most of that is my
handwriting, which I’m not necessarily proud of, and the other
handwriting I recognize as from Kevin Brown, who has moved on to other
things, he was one of our chief writers. And we just started riffing on
this idea and branching it out, sort of diagramming it. So, again,
there’s no design going on, we’re sort of diagramming out the story of,
‘Okay, if those are the values, and these are the opportunities, how
does this diagram itself out into a story that people can interact
with?’ And these, again, are from 3x5 cards and 5x7 cards that are
almost twenty years old, that we drew these little diagrams on, as we
tried to, you know take our brains through, ‘How are we going to
organize this,” and when we get to the sub pieces, how are we going to
organize them.

Now, you may notice that these don’t
necessarily look like the way the park actually turned out. It’s because
there are many many of these cards. Anything we worked on, it doesn’t
go in a straight line, it can’t go in a straight line, ‘cause you really
don’t know the conclusion, you only know the goal. So, every day, every
day presents you these branching choices in design, and you’re
constantly steering and branching, and steering and branching, as you
find your way towards which of the potential goals will actually be the
goal we can reach when we get to the outer end of this process. In a
way, it resembles a tree, where you start out at the root, you start out
where the tree touches the ground, and you know you’re gonna end up on
one leaf of this tree by the time you’re done, but you do not know which
leaf. So you just start travelling up this tree of ideas, and
constantly you are meeting opportunities, challenges, changes, and you
find your way out. So, these diagrams sometimes don’t look like what
ended up getting built, but they represent the way we thought about how
to build it, so that by the time it was done, we would be confident that
there would be strong, anchored ideas beneath what otherwise are kind
of weirdly disparate elements. I mean, there’s nothing that necessarily
pulls these things together emotionally, so that they make sense as a
story, not just as a place.

Like logically, sure, I can
logically go to Africa, but, which Africa? There’s so many versions of
Africa, we want an Africa that is going to tell us a story about a very
particular thing. In fact, we want it to be a story about a challenge to
the beauty, and the wonder, and the intrinsic value of the natural land
of Africa. So that tells us if Africa, the Africa we are going out
into, is supposed to be this beautiful, natural place, to make that
place appear more beautiful and natural, the village that you depart
from should not be that. So, where in Africa can we go to find
inspiration from a style of architecture that is authentic, that is
Africa, but does not mimic the feeling of nature that we want to have
when we go out into nature? And so that led us to the Swahili
architecture of the East Coast of Africa that, indeed, became the
inspiration for Harambe. It is true that this is a real form of
architecture that really exists along the East Coast of Africa, but
that’s not why we chose it. We chose it because the geometry, and the
hardness, and the whiteness, and the cubic quality of that architecture
sets it apart from this world of nature that we’re gonna go into, and
will make that world appear more natural when we go out into it,
because, after all, it’s not natural, it’s a giant machine that we are
building for keeping animals alive and moving thousands and thousands of
people an hour in vehicles through, so it’s got to feel like nature.
Not just look like nature, feel like nature. And part of the way we are
gonna do that is by managing the emotional sequence at the beginning.
So, if you feel the naturalness of that, then you are gonna feel the
threat all the more. Which is, of course, a threat to harvest out the
value of that nature, turn it from intrinsic value into monetary value,
and therein lies the conflict that is at the source of almost every
story at Animal Kingdom. The conflict between monetary, material value
and the intrinsic value of nature. Even Expedition Everest plays out
this story through its plotline.

So that makes it sound
like, ‘Oh we thought this up, and we followed the diagram, and we came
up with this idea, and it all worked out very neatly.’ But, of course,
as I said before, that is never how it really happens. It’s sort of like
being blindfolded with a stick, and sent off into the woods, and you
sort of beat and whack your way through the woods until you get to the
other side. So what follows, remember we already know we’ve got this
park about love of animals, intrinsic value of nature, we know that we
want to bring people into this park in some way that is different than
the way they’ve gotten into the other parks, which are about human
stories, and which are very architectural environments, and what follows
is a series of renderings of various explorations of how we might do
that.

There was the Ark version. Where we thought,
‘Well, you know, we’re trying to save the planet, like Noah, what if it
was like an Ark?’ And we thought, ‘You know what, we will never make it
two steps down the racetrack with this idea before we are up to our hips
in controversy.’ So, no Ark.

So, then we thought of
this idea, okay, it’s like a garden architectural environment, and it’s
got sculptures of all these animals and they’re marching their way into
the park, like they’ve come to the park as if it was like an Ark, and
they’re all marching in from everywhere, and we march in with these
animals, and they’re all around us and they’re all headed into the park.
And then we thought, ‘Okay, so that means when I come to the park, and I
look, at my first view, and I take the photograph of my view, I am
looking at hundreds of animals’ butts.’ Okay, so it’s not that, it’s not
that, that’s not the idea.

So, we go to another idea.
Okay, no, it’s gonna be like this kind of Woodstocky, woodsy little
village, with stained glass and, you know, art nouveauy little cottagey
things in the woods. And then we thought, ‘Okay, that’s great if you’re
like a hippie, but that’s not about animals, that’s going all the way
back to being about macramé and stained glass and granola, and that’s
not Animal Kingdom.’ So, we didn’t go there.

So, then
we had this, okay, it’s going to be this gigantic cavernous grotto, and
it’s full of ferns, and it’s like the beginning of the world and you’re
gonna go into this huge grotto and you pop out on the other side, and
you end up in the park. And, in fact, the grotto concept is the final
one that sort of everybody looks at and goes, ‘Alright.’ In my head,
this is my sad job, I have to do this all the time, I have this little
calculator in my head, and you go to somebody, ‘Okay, so, the grotto
concept, which is very appealing, very interesting idea. If you measure
your grotto, you’ll realize that the grotto alone, just the grotto,
represents about 400,000 square feet of rockwork, which is twice the
size of Expedition Everest.’ So, that’s probably not actually the idea,
because that’s like all the cement in Florida, going into one thing, and
we have a whole park the build. But there’s something in this idea, we
can use this idea, and find our way to the spirit of a place that we can
build, that still is this rich, green, caverny kind of place that we go
into on our way into the park, that calms us down, that changes the
mood, that instantly establishes that this experience, this park, is
about a different story, a different kind of experience than any
experience you’ve done before. And that’s kind of how you finally get to
one of these ideas.

Same thing with the Tree of Life.
This is one of the very first renderings of the Tree of Life. And if
you look at the people wandering around the Tree of Life, you’ll see
that it’s much smaller than even the Tarzan Treehouse. It’s like a
little tiny Tree of Life. This is another thing I do all the time, if I
take my fingers and I measure people in other people’s drawings, so
like, ‘Okay that person is six feet tall, right? That’s a grown up,
‘cause there’s a little kid next to them, so they’re six feet tall. So
if they’re six feet tall, and they’re standing next to that tree, that
tree is forty feet tall. Well, there’s twenty-five thousand dollars for
that one tree. So, and that tree’s forty five feet tall, that means that
tree back there is forty five feet tall, and if that tree is forty five
feet tall, then that means that that tower that you how behind that
tree is three-hundred and seventy-five feet tall. And if it’s really
three-hundred and seventy-five feet tall, it’s gonna have a big red
light on top. Is that what you meant?’

So, it is worth
looking at these renderings, because you really can see, Look, the
people are big, really big, that means the tree is really small. And it
wasn’t even in the middle of the park, but we moved it to the middle of
the park when we realized this one the kind of symbol we wanted in the
middle of the park. And then when we made the tree really big, we
completely chickened out, and decided, ‘Okay, well the tree is now so
big, that the only way we’ll ever be able to hold it up is to build a
giant geodesic dome, and then we’ll like stick fake leaves on the
outside of the geodesic dome. And it will look very geometric, but kind
of like a tree.’ And we spent a long time on this version of the tree,
which had a restaurant on the bottom floor, and kind of a play
environment all through the body of the tree, and this geodesic dome.
And finally one day, very late, very late, one of the engineers came and
said, ‘You know, now that we have designed the steel and the branches
to hold up that geodesic dome, those branches would hold up anything.
So, we don’t need the geodesic dome, because the tree is so strong now
that we can just hold up the branches themselves.’ So, of course this
sounds really cool, but it’s like a disaster, because it’s really late
in the sequence. And we’re like, ‘Okay, alright, if that’s what you want
to do, we gotta do it, we gotta do it quick, we gotta make these
changes, gotta come up with a new vision for the tree.” So we rapidly
reconceptualized the tree to become the tree you see today, and went
through our design process, and that, indeed, became the Tree of Life
that we built.

And, you know, you guys have all seen
the pictures with the giant steel thing that’s inside of it, and getting
the sculpting done on the surface of the tree. Which was, another whole
thing that, you know, you have this great idea, and then you realize,
‘Okay, okay, the whole tree is a work of art. It’s all about what the
tree looks like. It’s covered with animal forms, and tigers and
wildebeests and birds, and blah, blah, blah, blah, all this great stuff,
and we’re gonna sculpt that all over the tree. Well, anyone out there
with an art background knows that when you’re creating a work of art,
you need to be able to see it. But, to build it, you have to build
scaffolding, to get up and work on it and, of course, the scaffolding to
build the tree is so thick you can’t see the tree. So, we’re constantly
trying to imagine, I mean we are right up on top of this tree for a
year and a half trying to imagine, ‘Oh my god, I wonder what this thing
is going to look like when we drop all this scaffolding down, because,
you know, we’re not going to get much of a chance to learn,’ and we,
just frankly, you know, worked very very hard, they’re very skillful
artists, a lot of the work on the Tree of Life was done by real
professional sculptors who did a fantastic job of bringing it to life.

I’ll
talk about one other thing, I’m trying to go through some of these
ideas very carefully. Remember that we did a lot of research, we
travelled all over the world, doing the research to make Animal Kingdom
for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons is just that we knew that this
park needed to feel like reality, really feel like reality, and when you
build a three dimensional place, it’s not the same as a picture, it can
be very deceptive. If you go to a coffee table book, and you think
about, well, let’s just picture Venice, Italy, beautiful place, lovely
place, people go there on vacation. If I had the job of doing a coffee
table book on Venice, Italy, there’s all these layers that happen by the
time that coffee table book shows up. Some photographer goes to Venice,
Italy, he makes personal choices about what’s gonna make a good
photograph, not what Venice, Italy feels like, but what’s gonna make a
good photograph that he can put in a book to sell in his book about
Venice, Italy. So, he’s taken all of these photographs and looking, not
for the essence of Venice, Italy, but for those photographs which you
can take, which might evoke some qualities which are editorial about
Venice, Italy. Then he goes to a publisher, who says, “Well, you got
seventy-five thousand photographs here, I’m gonna use three hundred of
them. I like these, these will make a good book.’ We put that into a
book, there’s only so many of them, their sold in so many book stores,
you know, you’re way down at the bottom of this upside down pyramid of
information by the time you get a book in your hand about a subject.
When you go to a real place, and have real experiences, with real
people, in that place you come away with a very immediate holistic
sensation of what is it like to be there, and the experiences that we
have then become the foundation for the feelings that we try to
incorporate into this thing. Even with Everest we came away with this,
all the prayer flags, that was added rather late because when we went to
the area of the Himalayas that it was based on, I’d been there before,
but even I had not really thought through how much you feel the wind in
these areas. And the reason you feel it is because there are these
prayer flags everywhere, and they respond to the movement of air, and
they give it a whole atmosphere. So, this idea of travelling, to go to
these places, to have experiences, and to personally collect those
details, which you need to tell your version of a story is part of what,
I think, makes Animal Kingdom have that funny unique quality of feeling
so weirdly kind of real.

It also helps you realize
there are things you cannot do. These are photographs we took in the
Serengeti, on our very first trip to Africa, which, immediately made it
clear, ‘Look, we can’t do this. You would need hundreds of square miles.
You know, you can’t do this. If you lived in Kansas you could do this,
you know. We’re not in Kansas. We’re not doing this.’ We went and looked
for other photographs, photographs that we also took in Africa, where I
said, ‘Okay, we could do that. That looks like something we could do.
So let’s focus on that.’ So, we started looking through the photographs,
you know, culling through these photographs trying to figure out what
kind of environment can we create, that would be based on something
real, that fits our narrative needs. We’d make notes, we’d add things
up, and, as you guys know, eventually we’d come up with these techniques
to mimic the qualities of the environment that we saw in the real
places we went to.

But it is a very very designed
environment. Africa, for example, I was just out there yesterday with
this safari guide guy and we were driving around, and you know, we all
know there are like thirty-five trucks out there driving around, right?
And you never really see more than maybe three or four at a time, and
part of that is because of the very very deliberate design that we put
into Africa from the very beginning. We did some of the very first
digital modeling for large landscape firms that was ever done at this
scale. It took us days to print out one job like this, from these rooms
of computers that were sending all the data into. Now you do this in
Sketch-Up it’ll take you an hour and a half. But if you look closely at
the design plan for Africa, you’ll notice all these little humps, the
little shadow and highlight humps, like on a relief map, and those humps
are set in place just like the walls in scene between scenes, just like
in Pirates of the Caribbean. You know, as you ride through Pirates of
the Caribbean, you don’t realize that you are kind of looping back and
forth through an architectural environment from room to room, because
the walls in the scenes of the rooms prevent you from being aware of all
the other boats, and all the other rooms, and all the other scenes, and
the African safari was designed the same way. So that, when it was
finally executed, and when it was done, you wouldn’t really understand
how it laid out, and you wouldn’t be aware of the reality of what it is.
We’re not trying to present you with the reality of what it is, you’re
supposed to be inside a story, inside a story about being in a safari
camp in Africa. So, you know, we would do the renderings, expressing
kind of where we wanted the story to go. Another problem that we came up
against, which is kind of interesting, and a lot of these pictures I
don’t know have been seen before, they’re just kind of stuff I pulled
from the file. But, so we knew, unlike a scene in a ride, where you can
direct people to look over here, we knew two things. One, you can look
where ever you please, and number two, we will never know where the
focal object is going to be, which is an animal. The animal could be
anywhere and you could look anywhere. So, when we did our storyboards we
every thirty seconds, we drew a line on the ride track, estimated the
average speed of the vehicle, made a dot every thirty seconds, and we
drew these hundred and eighty degree storyboards that we would hold up
in front of our faces, like this, and go, ‘Okay, that’s at, you know,
second number seven-hundred, we’re here seeing something like this,
wildebeests might all be over here, they might all be over here, but
they’re gonna be here in this scene. Okay, pick up the next one,’ you
know. And we’d bend it around our head and go, ‘Alright, this is the
next scene, ‘ so we could get some sense of what is this going to be
like to progress through this environment, because back then there
wasn’t like, you couldn’t do a digital ride-through or something, no
such thing existed.

And then of course, how successful
are we going to be at everything we know, keeping the guests from
knowing those things, so that what they see, and what they feel is
completely natural in its feeling. This is a photograph I took during
production of the flamingo pool. And this is virtually the same view,
from the guest point of view as they drive by on the ride track. So,
this feels like nature and, of course, those flamingos have to be able
to stay there, they have to not have to worry that, you know, animals
are going to come get them, they have to have a safe life on a little
island where they can raise their babies, and yet, we don’t want you to
feel that. We want you to feel that, ‘Wow! I’m in Africa, and there
happen to be some flamingos over there.’ So we trying to sort of bury
the work that we did.

This is just another example of
starting from a real experience. In this case, we have the gibbons who
are on the islands, you know, in Asia. And we know that they need
something to swing on and climb on, that’s what they want to do, they
live in trees. So, we’re trying to figure, ‘Well, what in the world
could we possibly build that doesn’t look like a jungle gym, that makes
sense out of an environment where these gibbons would be climbing and
playing, and blah, blah blah.’ And we just happened on one of our
research trips to see this temple under restoration. The one in the
upper left hand corner, that’s a real temple, in Nepal, under
restoration, and that became the inspiration for what we ultimately
built as the gibbon temples, because it solved a problem that, frankly,
we didn’t know how to solve until we came across this example.

It’s
another interesting thing about the work we did is just working with
all of these different people from around world. Working with Balinese
carvers, working with bronze casters in Nepal, working with all these
different individuals from different cultures, it’s a real privilege
with Animal Kingdom to be able to do that, and to see the work of all
these people turned into something that not only is it a beautiful theme
park environment, but it has a kind of reality of its own. More than
just, ‘Oh, beautiful design,’ you know, a bunch of, you know, designers
in California thought it up, drew it, got built in a factory somewhere,
there really is real art in Animal Kingdom.

And
Everest, which, of course, is the most recent, is one of the best
examples of that, I think, in the park. And Everest has these ancient
roots, this actually, let’s see if I have this image here, this is
painting from, I did this, 1991. And it is a view from, pretty much,
where Flame Tree is now, looking out across the water to what Everest is
now, only that’s Bhutan, instead of Nepal, and the safari village, that
was Asia, moved on to the side of Asia, instead of on the side of the
island. The safari village originally were kind of on the island, and
you crossed over for just the safari. So this just went in a box, and
just went in a box, of like, ‘Okay, you know, we’re moving on, we’ve
branched off, we’re heading out towards the outer end of our tree, way
way way way way way down the road.’ And when the challenge came back to
do Expedition Everest, I had remembered that we had this rendering and
that we did have the idea that a mountain might be able to fit on the
other side of the river over there, and so we revisited this idea, and
then we, of course, had to go through all of that exercise again of
bringing meaning to this story. How is this challenge of putting a
roller coaster ride in Animal Kingdom ever going to fit into the story
of the intrinsic value of nature?

And some of you have
heard, or read, about the work we put into exploring the legend of the
yeti. The oral traditions, the Tibetan oral traditions of the yeti,
definitely involve this aspect of the yeti as a protector of pristine
forest environments. Where you find active legends of the yeti, where
people really believe that the yeti is real, they will point out where
they believe he lives, and it is always untouched, virgin, ancient
forests, and there’s very definite ways that they know. ‘This forest is
untouched, this forest is ancient, that’s where the yeti would be, the
yeti is the protector of the forest,’ all that kind of stuff. So, once
we knew that we had a story about the yeti as a protector, the yeti as a
defender of the mountain, a defender of the forest, a defender of a
place that humans are supposed to respect, and leave alone, we had a
story that we could run with, and we could begin to create these little
poems. You know, like there’s this little equation between the shrine on
the little peninsula and the mountain, and there you see the yeti
sitting on the shrine, and the shrine looks like the mountain, so the
mountain must be like a shrine, and there’s a yeti in the mountain, like
that. We chose the area of the Himalayas. There’s all kinds of Tibetan
architecture, there’s all kinds of Himalayan architecture. Once again we
wanted to go and pick the style of architecture that would push forward
the story that we wanted to tell, and that meant we needed to pick a
style of architecture that was all about symbols, symbolism, and
storytelling itself, and that indeed is what we did. So while it is,
indeed, authentic, it does look like real, it’s also been editorially
chosen for its ability to push a very particular story forward. You
know, we were able again to involve these people in creating the idea
because we could explain to them what’s the underlying message
underneath this, and then set these Tibetan, this guy this was designed
by a Tibetan guy, and we just sort of told him the story, and what’s the
underlying idea of the story, and let him go with the imagery. And
that’s how we come up with, you know, satisfying a very simple mission
to put a coaster into a park, but to do it in a way that contributes to
the overall feeling of the park.

And, you know, I think
when we all started a long long time ago that I’m sure none of us
realized how complicated it would be, we sort of learned as we went, but
it is something that does work very well, and it is something that does
include all of you. It’s the same process in the actions that you take
every day in your interactions with the guests, which, after all, are
the most living things they are going to interact with are the things
you do. Your actions at Animal Kingdom are the last layer that these
guests will interact with, and to have those actions embody the spirit
of these ideas, the intrinsic value of nature, the value of adventure,
the love of animals, the spirit of this place, it really helps push that
story forward and have the guests walk away with the sense that they’ve
experienced something special. They rush really fast, you know, they
come with a lot of anxiety, they spent a bunch of money, they’re trying
to get their value back, and there’s this anxiety of like, ‘How do I get
my value back from the money I spent to get here?’ And in their mind, I
think, is this idea that, ‘I’m gonna get my value back by doing all
these things, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, one after
another.’ I don’t think that’s true, I don’t think that that’s where the
value is, I think the value is in slowing down and enjoying these
relationships, relationships with you, as you speak to them, as you
interact with them, relationships with the animals, if they take time to
observe them. It takes so little time to just, you know, if you wait
forty-five seconds, instead of ten, that animal is gonna walk around
that bush and walk over here and it’s gonna walk away, and then
forty-five seconds later he’s gonna walk over here, but if you come for
three seconds, you miss all of that. It’s like channel-surfing at too
fast of a speed. So, as you present yourself, and present the park, to
the guests, and in knowing that they come with this, you know, urge to
rush, it would be, it’d be wonderful if you could get them to slow down,
to both enjoy the park, but also to enjoy the conversations, the
relationships that they have with all of you. It is a unique park that
offers us all the ability to deal directly with people, to have real
conversations, to actually talk about something, to not simply, you
know, perform a function. And so, I think it’s great that we have that
opportunity, I really don’t think that people come to Animal Kingdom
just to look passively at beautifully designed environments, there are
beautifully designed environments all over the world, there are
individual environments that have been designed in zoos in America that
are better than some of the stuff we have done, they come for something
else. They come for something richer, something more meaningful,
something more personal, something more emotional, and I think that that
is the aspect of the park that you all bring to it, and that’s really
important.

So, you know, we’ve obviously nowhere near
finished with Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and much much more to come in the
future, and I hope that, as we go forward, you take this to heart, you
know, when you go out and have a day in the park, remember, really, you
guys kind of are the show, and all that you do is really what the guests
really experience, and I hope that you treasure that, and value that,
and I certainly thank you for it. And thank you for your patience and
sitting through my rambling explanations, so, thank you very much.